1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a door latch, and more particularly to a gate latch.
2. Background
Latches for swinging doors or gates are known. Such latches can use hook-shaped latch bolts which can pivot about an axis in order to hook behind a reception element on the opposite door post to lock the door. As actuating elements, door knobs or handles are provided which can rotate about an axis parallel to the rotation axis of the hook-shaped bolt. By rotating the door knob or handle, the hook-shaped bolt can be lifted by means of the bolt operating mechanism to unlock the door.
In this known lock a quite heavy hook-shaped latch bolt, or even a double latch bolt, must be provided. Indeed, when closing the swinging door or gate, the rebound of the door or gate against the opposite door post to which the bolt reception element is fixed may cause considerably large forces in the bolt. A drawback of such a hook-shaped latch bolt is that when mounting the lock against a profile of the door or the gate so that the bolt has to extend entirely through this profile, a quite large rectangular hole has to be made for the bolt in the profile. This is not only due to the dimensions of the latch bolt itself but also to the fact that the hook-shaped bolt must be enabled to move transversally to its longitudinal direction in the hole in the profile in order to be able to hook behind the bolt reception element to lock the door.